A TikTok video of a woman singing to a Starbucks employee who shut the drive-thru window on her has gone viral—but it’s not what you think.
In the video, the woman in the car starts singing: “Thank you for giving me this drink, you are pretty cute,” to the Starbucks worker, but he closes the window on her and walks away.
The woman then says to the passenger in her car: “Did he just close that? I’m so embarrassed,” as the passenger calls the employee rude.
The video has been viewed more than 700,000 on TikTok and more than 1.5 million times on Twitter and has sparked a conversation about people using service employees for social media content.
On Twitter, it was shared by Asia Chloe Brown, who said: “Service workers not tolerating people using them for content >>>>” in a tweet that has been liked more than 200,000 times.
Twitter users were angered by the clip, like @_RealShante who said: “Human beings have no empathy, who wants to be at work doing their job and have to deal with people acting like idiots for clout.”
Twitter user @robingoodzmusic said: “the amount of pure bliss that overcame me when he shut the window is unmatched.”
However, although there are plenty of challenges and trends that involve filming service workers for social media attention, the video that has inspired this discussion is not what it seems.
In a follow-up TikTok, the woman, Tanja, or @tanjewest on TikTok, said: “Hey everyone, you actually won’t believe what happened. I ended up baning on the drive-thru window and climbed through it. I did get him fired but now we’re on our way to our first date. Thank you all for all the love.”
She then turns the camera towards the Starbucks worker who is sitting in the car with her.
But even this is not entirely true. In a comment under the follow-up video @tanjewest said: “He’s my husband y’all but the video wasn’t staged—we visited him at work and wanted to embarrass him so I started singing when I pulled up.”
Tanja’s TikTok account is full of videos of herself and her husband, Ben, including a video from October 2020 that amassed 6.3 million views and 1.8 million likes in which she says that she accidentally sprayed her coworker with pepper spray four years ago and is now married to him.
The video included clips of Ben recovering from the pepper spray followed by clips from their wedding day.
Another video sees Tanja pretend that her husband is a homeless man that she spotted on her walk and took into her home, before giving him a makeover, and saving his life.
While the conversation happening on Twitter about pranking service workers for social media content is valid, it would seem as though the only people getting pranked by Tanja are those watching her TikTok videos.
Newsweek has contacted Tanja for comment.
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